A Silver Garden
by Lomonaaeren
Summary: HPDM slash. Harry and Draco dream every night of the same place: a silent garden sleeping under the snow. COMPLETE.


**Title: **A Silver Garden

**Disclaimer: **J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.

**Pairing: **Harry/Draco

**Rating: **PG

**Warnings: **Fluff, present tense

**Wordcount: ** 3700

**Summary: **Harry and Draco dream of the same place each night: a silent garden slumbering under snow.

**Author's Notes: **An Advent fic for sorarin, who gave me the prompts "fish, tomato, snow" and asked for fluff. I'm afraid I couldn't manage to work Narcissa in. Happy Advent!

**A Silver Garden**

Harry opens his eyes and looks around. A second later, he's so surprised that he sits up. He's been a lot of different places in his dreams of late, mostly nightmare visions, but _this _is a new one.

He's been lying on his back in the midst of snow so fluffy it feels like cotton as it breaks around him. It's cold, but only slightly, as if a charm protects him despite his lack of a wand here. When he stands up, he can see the low wall that encircles an area of the snow. The wall seems to be made of slick silver bricks, or perhaps ice. Harry looks around expectantly, but sees no funeral, no flames of Fiendfyre, no sight of Voldemort. It's definitely not a usual dream.

For that matter, he doesn't think he's felt the cold so acutely in any dream, even in this muffled way.

After a few minutes of standing there, he begins to wander around. There's no sign of a house, but when he clears snow from a squarish mound, he reveals a bench. Then he stumbles over a smaller wall, and kicking the snow off that, he shows the square edge of a flowerbed. At least, it's a flowerbed if the round shape crouched in the middle of it is a rosebush, which Harry is sure it is when he sticks himself on a thorn.

He sucks most of the blood off his finger, but a drop escapes and plops on the snow that covers the wall around the flowerbed.

In seconds, the bricks—they're ice, Harry's sure of it, nothing else is that transparent—flush and flash a deep scarlet. There's far more scarlet than there was blood, traveling through the ice bricks like a leaping dancer. And then some of the blood travels into the center of the flowerbed, and doesn't melt the snow, but turns it into a carpet of what looks like rose petals. When Harry reaches down into the middle of them, that's what they feel like, too.

Harry smiles. He's had worse dreams than of a garden where rose petals cover everything.

* * *

Draco turns in a slow circle, and his hand reaches for his wand before he realizes that it's not there.

For a moment, he panics, but then he calms down and shakes his head. He's often unarmed in dreams. And a dream is better than the situation he would be facing if he was awake. He was surprised and thrilled when the Aurors accepted him into their training program, but now he thinks he knows why. They want a living target to demonstrate their spells on to the "real" trainees.

But the Aurors have taught him something about observation, almost in spite of themselves, so Draco begins to move slowly around the snowy space, calming himself down and making his eyes work for him. The snow under his feet squeaks softly. It's that deep and that cold, then, although surprisingly it doesn't _feel _cold.

The wall is made of ice. Draco knows no magic that could hold ice in that shape and yet make the space—a graveyard?—as warm as it is. He takes a step forwards, and his foot slides out from under him.

Draco rolls, scrambling to his feet and swearing. This isn't a dream, it's another bloody hallucination engineered by the Aurors! They've probably been waiting to see how he would react. Draco is amazed that they haven't already broken into anticipatory roars of laughter.

But no one comes up to him. No one attacks him. And it occurs to Draco, as the cold softly prickles across his skin and his heartbeat settles back to normal, that this lot really _wouldn't _be able to hold in the guffaws.

He bends down and clears what made him slip of snow with a few waves of his hand.

It's a sheer surface of ice. A frozen pool, Draco decides after a second of observation. Transparent and turquoise and gleaming, the perfect color of water that water never is, but it's interesting. And it increases the likelihood that this is a dream. The Aurors would have had long tentacles shatter the ice and reach up for him by now.

He observes, and sees shadows under the surface. No matter how he squints, though, he can't make out what they are. He shakes his head in annoyance at himself a second later. What does it matter? This is only a dream.

As his head shakes, a strand of hair breaks loose and drifts down onto the surface of the pond.

In seconds, it sinks through, as though it's a pinpoint of light, without damaging the ice in any way. Draco stares as it drops and drops into the water, and begins to glow. The light spreads through the pool under the ice, and throws the shadows into sharp relief. And then the shadows begin to move.

They're fish. They have scales gleaming like sleek blue metal, like black ice on a moonlit night, and golden as if in reflection of the hair. Draco watches, entranced, as they swim. It's been a long time since he saw something as beautiful.

He tries to tell himself that's a sign of how sad his life has become, when _fish _can attract him and make him think they're lovely, but he's still smiling when he sets out to walk through the garden. This is a dream he wouldn't mind having again.

* * *

"What are you doing here?"

"What are _you_?"

They stare at each other, and then Harry lifts his hands and cuts them down, as if he would cut Draco out of his vision.

"I dreamed of this place—"

"I dreamed of it first—"

"How would _you _know that?"

"How would you know anything except whatever shallow thoughts fill that muddled head of yours?"

They glare at each other this time. Harry finally speaks. "I know that you've been causing trouble in the Auror division. If this is your idea of trouble, sneaking into my dreams and taking away my privacy—"

"Yes, I'm making a lot of trouble when six other trainees get together to stage an attack on me." Draco sneers and folds his arms. "Finnegan among them."

"Seamus wouldn't do something like that!"

Draco smiles, as if he's seen a shadow of uncertainty in Harry's eyes. "Really? You don't think so? He's never played a prank in his life? He doesn't have a reason to want to impress Professor Zostar by showing off that Bone-Breaking Curse he demonstrated to us the other day, all the while hinting about the lack of a proper subject?"

"Seamus used that on _you_?"

Draco pulls back his right sleeve—Harry tenses—and reveals a single long scar on his arm, product of the skin splitting when the broken bone projected out. It's recent. Harry steps back, his eyes flicking from the scar to Draco's face.

"I don't know—I'm going," Harry says, and hurries off. Draco watches him, and then stalks away, in the opposite direction.

Behind them, the garden snows.

* * *

The next time Harry comes to the garden, he glances around cautiously, but he's alone.

He finds the pool filled with swimming fish, and watches it for a long time. At the bottom of it, he thinks he can see something glimmering. He squints, but can't make out. The only thing he can make out for certain is that someone's lit a light down there, and it burns and makes the cool water about it alive.

Maybe it's something Malfoy's done. It doesn't sit right with Harry, that the git can visit here, too.

But he does wonder about the Bone-Breaking Curse, and the way that Seamus just laughed and said, yeah, he used it on Malfoy when Harry asked him. And he wonders about the Auror instructors, and the way they're sneering at Malfoy when he looks in on the classes (Malfoy is a year behind him, and Harry no longer shares many of the same classes). If they hate him so much, if they despise him for being a Death Eater, they should have just kept him out of the program, in Harry's view. Not let him in and then tormented him.

He finds himself standing in front of the rosebush, still draped in shining petals made from his blood, and shakes off the thought of Malfoy. Nothing he can do about that situation here, anyway. He wonders if he can bring anything else in the garden to life.

It takes him a short while to do it without his wand, because all the thorns on the rosebush seem to be muffled by the shining petals now, and there's no good way to get a grip on them. But finally Harry manages to slice a finger on the sharp edge of an ice wall. He finds a place where bushes stand tall in soft mounds and there are long, slender lines on the ground that could be vines, and squeezes his finger over them.

For a moment, the vines tremble as if someone is lifting the earth beneath them instead. And then they _pop_. Harry stares in astonishment at the rich, red rounds on them. It's not until he bends down and smells them that he knows for certain what they are.

Tomatoes. Glowing in the midst of the snow and smelling like summer. When Harry picks one of them and puts it in his mouth, there's a moment of thick, liquid surprise before he swallows, and then the taste of them is on his tongue, richer than any ordinary tomato he remembers eating.

Standing there in the garden, feasting on the tomatoes he grew with his own blood, Harry is purely happy. He might not be able to do much about bullying in the Auror program, at least not until he finds out more about what's going on, but he can bring life springing out of snow with a drop of blood. It makes him think about gardens in the real world, and what he can do in them.

Not that it's likely to be as easy there as here, he has to admit.

* * *

"Potter?"

Draco calls the name warily, and then waits, his hand curved down at his side. He misses his wand. He _always _does, especially when someone is holding him down and yelling into his face, but maybe he can look as if he has it if he holds his hand a certain way.

There's no response, though, and after a moment, Draco relaxes, certain that Potter isn't here. Potter isn't the type to hide and not respond to a challenge. Draco begins to wander, wanting to find out what else lies hidden in this silent, beautiful place.

He visits his pool, and notices the addition of some beautiful velvet-green fish with deep black rosettes spotted with gold to the water. He's contemplating them with pleasure when he notices red out of the corner of his eye.

He turns around, and there are _tomatoes _growing there.

Draco doesn't need to be told this is Potter's doing. No one else would make something so absurd in the middle of a garden still locked in winter. He doesn't know how Potter did it, either, but he reckons it had something to do with his blood. Potter's hair would never make something so red if he had also dropped a piece, even if it _does _show glints of red in certain lights.

Draco grimaces. He doesn't want to think about red hair, or Weasleys. Instead, he goes in search of something else to transform.

He finds a mound of snow that won't clear off no matter how much he scrapes at it. It seems to be frozen, stuck, to whatever it's beneath. Draco breaks a single strand of hair free and carefully lays it on the stubborn ice.

There's no sinking this time. Instead, a single pure, clear note chimes out across the garden, making Draco step back in startlement. He looks around carefully. If someone _does _live in the garden and owns this space, this is the time that they'll come out and find Draco, and probably make him pay for disturbing something as silent and beautiful as this.

But instead, the mound vibrates, and shakes. And although Draco thinks the mound was too large to contain just this, what comes out is pretty enough to make up for it being small.

A golden hare bounds through the garden, its tail and ears and paws tipped with white. It flips and leaps as though it disdains contact with the earth, but then always returns to the ground again and rolls in the snow, rejoicing. It pauses and combs an ear with one paw, an eye on Draco, then drums one great foot on the ground and takes off towards the ice wall. In seconds, it's zigzagged back and goes skidding across the frozen surface of the pool, front paws scrabbling. Draco laughs.

He never believes for a second that it's really out of control, and in fact the hare breaks free of the ice a second later, jumping from it as if it's not slick at all, and buries itself wriggling in another mound of snow that must be softer.

Draco smiles. An awful week can cease to matter at the sight of a playing animal. If he ever knew that before now, he'd forgotten it.

* * *

"So. You're still here."

"Yeah. I am."

They face each other warily across the snow, and then Harry starts when the golden hare runs by. Draco smiles. They promptly go back to studying each other as warily as if those were the opening moves in a war. Or at least a chess game.

"Why are you here? We here?" Harry asks that question and looks intently at Draco as if actually waiting for an answer.

"Who can tell?" Draco shakes his head, and his hair wisps around him. "Maybe it's part of a shared fever dream because of the intensity of Auror training. Or maybe someone put something in our tea."

Harry says nothing for long seconds. His eyes are on the snow. Or the tomatoes. Or the roses. Or the fish pond. Or the hare that races past, kicking up long glittering arcs of snow in its sheer joy at being alive.

"I talked to Seamus about the Bone-Breaking Curse."

"Why?"

"Because I couldn't believe he did it, that's why!" Harry's breath rises in a thick column above him, along with his shout. "Because he never would have done something like that in school, and I wanted to know why."

Draco rolls his eyes. "Because I'm the same person I was in school, according to him. And he hates me, and he wants me to suffer. It's the same reason that the Auror instructors punish me all the time. Although I think they hate what I stand for, or what I remind them of, rather than me, personally."

"They shouldn't be allowed to do that!" Harry's cutting gesture, this time, does not seem meant to banish Draco.

"Well. They are." Draco shrugs.

"Are you going to drop out of the program?" Harry moves a step towards Draco.

"No. Fuck them."

Harry pauses, then nods. "Good for you, Malfoy." And he turns and walks away over the snow in the direction of the roses. He doesn't vanish. He draws another drop of blood from his finger in order to grow another plant. Draco watches him for a moment, then turns and breaks off a strand of his hair.

Behind them, the garden grows.

* * *

This time, the minute he comes to the garden, Harry turns and looks towards the wall of red he's lifted in the distance.

_So little blood, to do all that, _he thinks.

Red roses nod and blend with the wind, startling among the silver of the snow, against the largest ice wall, the one that encircles the outside of the garden. Ripe tomatoes live shining among the drifts that should kill them. A fire-colored tree whose name Harry doesn't know rears up with silver branches; the snowflakes take as readily to them as to anything else. And there are more plants, more he can bring to life, if he wants to.

When he stands, Malfoy's golden hare dashes past him, and Harry knows what that means without looking around. "Malfoy," he acknowledges, and heads over to find a thorn to cut his finger. With the roses standing tall and proud now, that's no longer a problem.

"Potter. What plant are you going to revive this time?" Malfoy walks up beside him, craning his neck as though that will allow him to see the plant faster than Harry can.

Harry laughs. "I never know what anything is under the snow until I bleed on it. Why should this be different?" And he sheds the blood on a piece of the garden that doesn't have a wall around it, isn't a tame and growing flowerbed. He's eager to see what will result.

His blood foams up as though it's hit a fountain, or become one, and Harry wonders if this is the one part of the garden resistant to being changed. But instead, it whirls around, and grows in a way that seems to spring from the earth even before it reveals its shape, and _not _in the way a plant does.

Instead, a scarlet fox, with silver shining eyes and a silver tip to the brush of its tail, takes off in a chase of the hare. Harry stares with his mouth wide, and watches as they curve all around the garden, taking invisible paths, racing in a way that tells Harry the pursuit isn't serious, and isn't going to end in the demise of one and the sated hunger of the other.

"Why did that happen?" he whispers, almost forgetting the person behind him who might answer. "I've never created an animal before."

"I don't know. Let me try something with my hair—"

But the voice fades, and Malfoy is gone. He must have woken up. With an irritated sigh that he doesn't want to analyze, Harry steps back and watches the continual coursing of fox and hare, leaping and dashing and springing and twirling among all the red-gleaming plants, past the fishpond and the golden crowing cock that Malfoy made, which likes to sit in the fire-tree. Currently it's scolding the other animals as they dash past. Harry has to smile.

* * *

The next time they meet up in the garden, Draco doesn't bother talking to Potter. He simply walks over to the side of the garden nearest him, and yanks out a hair—wincing when he does so, hearing Potter catch his breath for some reason—and tosses the hair on the snow in one of the curving ice-guarded beds that he's assumed without thinking about it are Potter's territory in their shared garden.

The hare comes to sit by his heels, almost the only time Draco has ever seen it still. The fox circles in the background with restless energy, but even it goes still and stares when Draco's hair sprouts as he thought it would.

The golden flowers grow like bells at first, making it hard for Draco to tell what they are, until they reach their top of their rise and their furled tops open. They are sunflowers, and they turn and aim their heads at the muted sun present here as though they will grow there forever.

Which might be true, Draco realizes. He still has no idea why this garden is in their dreams, why he and Potter _share _dreams, but he knows that the changes they make here are permanent, adding beauty to the garden without altering the essential nature of snow and ice.

"They're beautiful," Potter says, coming up beside him. At the same moment, the fox nips at the hare through Draco's ankles, and the hare leaps up and run-hops away, the fox skittering behind it.

"They are," Draco says, but he's not necessarily looking at the sunflowers.

* * *

"So, you think—"

"Yes. They won't bother you any longer."

"You didn't have to do that. You _shouldn't _have done it."

Harry shrugs. "All it really took was pointing out to Kingsley that he doesn't want violent trainees who are likely to beat up _other _people, or professors who can't be objective. They weren't just picking on you. They were favoring other trainees. Like me."

Draco frowns and tilts his head down a little, as if studying the snow at his boots. "Potter, when you have someone favoring you, you go with it. You don't dispense with it."

"I won't waste time arguing philosophy with you, but everything you just said is wrong." Harry steps towards Draco when Draco's mouth opens. "For one thing, I hate attention unless it comes from a very few people." Draco shivers. "And second, my name is _Harry_."

They stare at each other for a moment. In the background, the sunflowers and the roses sway, the golden cock crows from the fire-tree, the tomatoes sprawl beside the fish pond, and the fox and hare double back along the ice-wall.

"Yes," said Draco. "It is, isn't it? And can you guess mine?" He is smiling. So is Harry.

"_Draco_, I think," Harry says, and his fingers come to rest lightly on Draco's cheek.

They wander away towards the walls together, bodies turned towards each other, voices too soft to hear. The fox and hare circle them in their endless game of chase, all the more fun when it's two moving as one.

Behind them, the garden glows.

**The End.**


End file.
